The Day Kennedy Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

  Did Marina Oswald recognize the weapon? She and Mrs. Paine studied it with curiosity. Even to those who neither understand nor appreciate rifles, this one would appear to be cheap. Black paint had worn off the fibers of the wood stock. The telescopic sight was twisted to the left side. The leather sling, with its pad of soft leather in the center for shoulder-carrying was dirty. Marina stood to examine it. She didn’t touch it. Then she shrugged. In Russian she said it could be the rifle owned by her husband. One detective reminded her that she had said her husband owned a rifle in Russia. Could this be it? It could be, she said. Obviously, she did not know the difference between a rifle and a shotgun.

  Mr. Mamantov felt obliged to volunteer the information that no citizen in Russia is permitted to own a rifle. A shotgun yes, but not a rifle. Mr. Mamantov subsided. He was not a witness; his function was to translate. “When did he buy his gun?” Mrs. Oswald shifted the squirming baby to the other knee. “I don’t know. He always had guns. He always played with guns even in the Soviet Union. He had a gun and I don’t know which gun was this.” “Would you recognize his gun—do you know it by color?” “All guns are dark and black as far as I am concerned.”

  Fritz told his detectives to question her about the telescopic sight. A detective touched it. “Is this what you saw?” he asked. “No,” she said. “No. I saw the gun. I saw a gun. All guns are the same to me—dark brown or black.” He pointed to the sight again. “No,” she said. “I have never seen a gun like that in his possession.” She pointed dramatically to the sight. “This thing.” The questions stopped. “No. I have only seen this part of the gun,” pointing to the stock. “The end of the gun.” They asked if she had seen it rolled up in that blanket. “Yes. Dark brown, black.”

  More questions were asked. The rifle went back to the laboratory. Fritz said, “Excuse me” and returned to his prisoner. Marina answered everything candidly but volunteered no additional information. She might have told them about her husband’s confession to her that he had tried to kill Major General Edwin Walker at his home. She could, if she chose, have told them about the day he wanted to assassinate the Vice-President of the United States and of how she had locked him in the bathroom. She confined herself to the questions.

  Mrs. Paine told of her relationship with the Oswalds and her trip to New Orleans in a station wagon to return Marina to Dallas. None of it was exciting material. Still it added bits and chips of information to the rapidly augmented pile. The affidavits were typed and ready for signature. Mrs. Paine read hers—it stated, among other things, that she heard Marina say, in the garage this afternoon, that her husband had kept a rifle in that blanket. She signed it. Marina’s, written in English, had to be retranslated in Russian word by painful word. She said: “Da” and signed.

  There was a commotion in the next office, and Marina looked up in time to see a stout middle-aged woman coming into the Forgery Bureau. She gave a cry and arose to hand Rachel to her paternal grandmother. Marguerite Oswald looked down at the tiny face in her arms. Tears glistened behind her glasses. The women fell into each other’s arms, neither one able to communicate except by embraces and kisses. Marguerite was moaning: “I didn’t know I was a grandmother again. Nobody told me.”

  Policemen glanced up from their work and returned to the study of affidavits. Ruth Paine stood and extended her hand. “Oh, Mrs. Oswald,” she said. “I am so glad to meet you. Marina wanted to contact you, but Lee didn’t want her to.” The grandmother stopped weeping. She rocked the baby back and forth in her arms and turned the large eyes of the inquisitor upon Mrs. Paine. “You speak English,” she said. “Why didn’t you contact me?” Mrs. Paine felt embarrassed. “Well,” she said, “because of the way they lived. He lived in Dallas and came home on weekends. I didn’t want to interfere.”

  The grandmother began to dominate the scene. She told Mrs. Paine to tell her daughter-in-law that she had been on her way to work in her car when she heard on the radio that Lee had been arrested. The police had asked her about a rifle that Lee was supposed to have, but she as a mother knew of no such weapon. The inference could have been that she hoped that no one else would recall a rifle.

  Then she heard the admissions in Marina Oswald’s affidavit as Mr. Mamantov read them slowly. The grandmother may have felt that Marina did not understand the question. Besides, who would know what the young woman said when the police had their own interpreter? Ruth Paine wasn’t paying much attention to Marguerite Oswald’s debate with the police. She recalled that six weeks ago her friend Marina had said: “It is only proper to tell the woman of the coming baby.” Her husband did not want Marina to contact his mother. He said he didn’t even know her address. He ordered his wife to leave his mother out of family matters.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Marguerite Oswald said, turning her gaze upon Mrs. Paine. “I want to stay in Dallas and be near Lee, so that I can help with this situation.” Mrs. Paine gave the proper response. “You are welcome in my home,” she said, “if you care to sleep on the sofa.” The grandmother was grateful. “I’ll sleep on the floor to be near Dallas,” she said.

  She asked the police if the ladies could leave. The men phoned Fritz. All had made statements and signed them. They could go. In the next office Michael Paine was signing his words. Robert Oswald had concluded his interrogation. Mrs. Oswald pulled her white uniform skirt out from her side. “It’s all I brought,” she said. She had demanded to see her son Lee, but this privilege had been denied “until later.” He was thirty feet away.

  A policeman escorted Robert Oswald to meet his family. His mood was depressed. His younger brother was involved in an infamous crime. The name Oswald, which Robert had carried with honor, would be anathema all over the world. The situation, beyond doubt, would affect Robert’s life and his career. In addition, he did not get along well with his mother. She masterminded every family difficulty, and Robert felt that, in the main, she was concerned solely with herself. Then there was this Russian woman and a baby—who would take care of them? Robert?

  He walked into the office and saw Marina with two babies. Robert was surprised. Neither could understand the other, so he nodded. A tall, slender woman stepped between them and said: “I’m Ruth Paine. I’m a friend of Marina and Lee. I’m here because I speak Russian, and I’m interpreting for Marina.” Robert Oswald felt little interest. He had just met her husband in the next office, and, when they shook hands, Oswald felt an instant dislike for Michael Paine.

  He was still trying to greet his sister-in-law when his mother said: “I would like to speak to you—alone” and took him into an empty office. The jowly face quivered, the eyes stared around the room, and Marguerite whispered: “This room is bugged. Be careful what you say.” The young man thought: All my life I’ve been hearing her tell me about conspiracies, hidden motives, and malicious people.

  “Listen,” he said loudly. “I don’t care whether the room is bugged or not. I’d be perfectly willing to say anything I’ve got to say right there in the doorway. If you know anything at all about what happened, I want to know it right now. I don’t want to hear any whys, ifs, or wherefores.”

  Apparently this speech caused her to forget to whisper. She began to speak swiftly and dynamically. She wanted Robert to know that she was sure his baby brother Lee had been carrying out official orders, if he had done anything wrong. When he went to Russia, she said, she was convinced that he was a secret agent for the United States government. He could have been recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency while he was still in the Marine Corps. If so, and if he was involved in some act today, well, the boy was probably under orders.

  Robert was half listening, half meditating. His mother had learned that her son was a possible assassin of a President of the United States with no sense of shock. He felt her reaction was that she was about to receive the kind of attention she had craved all her life. She would never again be regarded as an unknown woman among millions of them. And yet he knew he mus
t stand here and listen. It was his mother. The chronic sorrow was that, of her children, he and his half brother John Pic were hardworking responsible citizens, whereas she and the little loner made harsh and inexorable demands of life. They wanted recognition. Now they had it. It was such a joy that neither mother nor gunman had time to devote a moment of grief for the man who had fallen among the roses.

  The doctors stepped away from the body on the table. Alone, it had more dignity under the white light. The supple arms, the strong hands were at his sides. The radiologist, from outside the area, called out his orders. The enlisted men moved the body at his whim. The large X-ray plates numbered fourteen. Among them were a front shot of the head, a lateral shot, a posterior picture. The positions were repeated for the thoracic cavity and the abdomen. Several pictures were made of the complete head and torso.

  Before the next phase of the autopsy began, the doctors waited for the wet plates to be developed. A Navy photographer used the pause to get on a ladder and make color photographs and black and white pictures of the body as it appeared—front, side, and back—when received at the hospital. The commanding officers explained that these negatives would not be developed or printed. It did not occur to them that there was no point in ordering photographs if they were not to be used to support and augment the findings of the autopsy itself. The cassettes of film would go to the Secret Service, which was expected to make them a shocking gift to the widow. The philosophy of the Navy, on the night of November 22, 1963, was to play it safe and survive. The death of a President is a sensitive political event.

  The witnesses sat quietly. The doctors waited. They had schematic drawings of a male body, front and back; they had drawings of the human head looking down at the top of the skull. They made terse notes, early impressions, and dots to represent wound punctures. None of these were exact; they did not even agree precisely with each other. Neither Humes nor Boswell realized that, outside this room, in the world of darkness, were laymen writers who could and would distort the early misconceptions, the burning of erroneous notes, the underdeveloped photographs into a malicious and mysterious plot to deny the American people its right to know the truth about the wounds.

  It is difficult to search for sympathy for the United States Navy, the most pontifical of the American forces, because the senior officers had decreed, without warrant, that the main focus of the night must be centered on secrecy. A Marine guard was posted outside the autopsy room as though some unauthorized citizen might try to force his way into a scene which no sane layman would want to witness. Heads had been counted; names had been recorded; the mutilation of the dead, which is a scientific concomitant of a search for truth, was to be executed with such aggressive secrecy that, for years to come, no outsider would be permitted to see this room, even when it was empty.

  In addition, the United States Navy did not assign the best qualified physicians to conduct the autopsy because they were not available. Commander James Joseph Humes, a product of Villanova University and Jefferson Medical College, functioned as director of laboratories of the Naval Medical School. He was an administrator. Among his confreres, Humes was known to be an excellent pathologist, an expert in the nature and cause of disease and the changes it brings to the body. It could be regarded as an imposition to order him to autopsy a body and qualify as an expert in missile trajectories and damage.

  To assist Humes, Commander J. Thornton Boswell had been ordered to report to the autopsy room. Among the physicians available at the center, Boswell enjoyed the confidence of the officers, but he, too, was hardly a monumental choice for an autopsy involving violent death. This is not to say that Humes and Boswell were unqualified to conduct an autopsy; it was not their specialty. Humes was so conscious of this that, when he was offered an opportunity to secure the services of a qualified second assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Finck, he agreed. The colonel was chief of the Wounds Ballistics Branch of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. He had a career of four hundred cases of bullet wounds and two hundred autopsies. Although Finck was the most experienced, Commander Humes was in charge of the work.

  The preparatory examination and the photography were complete by the time Colonel Finck arrived. Quickly, he gowned and masked and came into the autopsy room just as the X-rays were being placed on big illuminated opaque screens. Dr. Humes invited the laymen witnesses to come over to the screens and listen to a dissertation on the initial findings. Kellerman, Greer, Dr. Burkley, Sibert, O’Neill, and the others looked at the big negatives. A radiologist with a pointer took the frames one by one. Where there was no pathological finding, as in the abdomen, it was so stated and the doctor moved on to the more dramatic studies.

  Most puzzling was the wound in the right strap muscles. It was almost certainly a wound of entry, because the hole was small and round, slightly elliptical, with no ragged serration which usually attends a wound of exit. The exit is often larger than a wound of entry because the missile, after striking the resistance of a body, sometimes begins a tumbling effect in its progress.

  Humes or Boswell, on the schematic drawing of the body, seem to have made the wound of entry slightly lower on the body than it was. On the X-rays, it appeared at the lower end of the sloping muscle branch which extends from the neck toward the shoulder. It was hardly possible that a metal missile, moving at close to a half mile per second, could pierce the fleshy muscles less than one inch and stop. In addition, there was the question of what had happened to such a bullet.

  The FBI and Secret Service men listened and made notes. The driver of the car, Greer, asked if he had permission to speak. The doctors listened. He said that a bullet had been found on a stretcher—or rather as it fell from a stretcher—in Parkland Memorial Hospital and had been sent on to the FBI laboratory for examination. Could this be the bullet that went into the neck and, in the jostling of the President on the stretcher, fell out?

  The doctors agreed that it was a possibility. They could hardly subscribe to a thesis which depicted a dying bullet which did not have the energy to go through boneless masses of flesh, but it must be considered. If some foreign object had slowed the bullet—like hitting the back of the car—it could not have made that clean 6-millimeter circle; it would have been tumbling end over end and a large ugly entrance would have resulted.

  Greer’s question should have taught caution to the doctors, because it pointed up what they did not know about the events in Dallas. The superior officers—Captain Canada and Admiral Galloway—medically oriented, could easily have recessed the proceedings for fifteen minutes or a half hour. All that would be required was to phone Parkland Memorial Hospital and ask for Dr. Clark or Dr. Carrico—whether at home or in the hospital. If not those, then any of the other attending physicians could have helped. Bethesda might have said: “You had the body of the President. What were your wound findings and what methods and treatment were employed?”

  The news that an exit wound had been found in the lower front of the neck—one which frayed the back of the knot on the President’s tie—would have settled, beyond doubt, that the bullet had gone through the back of the neck muscles and out the trachea. The Texas doctors could have stated that the exit wound had been enlarged to form a tracheostomy. The mystery could have been dissolved at once. No one pursued it.

  Colonel Finck studied the X-rays of the head carefully. There was a hole about 6 millimeters in size in the lower right-hand section of the back of the head. It was round and consistent with an entry wound. If this portion of the head was hit by a 6.5-millimeter bullet, the hole in scalp and skull would shrink to 6 millimeters after the missile passed. Once inside the brain, it would bevel the inside of the skull, tumble, causing the massive hole in the upper right side as the wound of exit. If, after he had been hit in the neck, his head fell forward and the body tilted to the left, as witnesses swore, then the small hole in the skull would result in the big one.

  The X-rays showed the metal fragments still in the head. There was a c
omparatively large piece of bullet—7 by 2 millimeters—behind the right eye. There were a few grains inside the “cone effect” entrance wound. The remainder of this bullet, emerged with flying skull and hair, apparently broke into two sections, and they were found on the front seat of the car. The first bullet, which missed target and car, was torn to flying grains when it hit the roadway, nicked a curb, and peppered the face of Mr. Tague on Commerce Street.

  Greer’s thesis had a supporter. Roy Kellerman, Agent-in-Charge, said he remembered a Parkland doctor astride the chest of the dead President, applying artificial respiration. Kellerman, a solemn man and a deliberate one, thought the bullet in the back of the shoulder might have been squeezed out by manual pressure. If so, the man who found a bullet on a stretcher in the hall was mistaken in thinking it came from Governor Connally’s cart.

  Medical judgment was reserved. Colonel Finck was not convinced. In all of his experience with bullet wounds he could not recall a missile entering flesh and stopping short. The X-rays showed no bullet path to the throat because the shot, instead of tearing through the strap muscles, had separated two layers and furrowed between, leaving insignificant bruises on the under side of one and the upper side of another. It emerged from the throat with most of its speed intact to hit the Governor.

  The prisoner was on the private elevator heading down for another lineup. The fawn-hatted detectives hopped in beside Lee Harvey Oswald and the door was closed. They could still hear the shouts of reporters in the corridor. “Why did you shoot the President?” “Bastard!” “Son of a bitch!” None of the older reporters could remember a story in which the journalists expressed personal venom. Reporters at Rheims who had witnessed the surrender of Germany expressed no hatred. Others, aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, had watched with equanimity as the Japanese signed the document of surrender. Some had put in considerable time at the Nuremberg trials without rancor. In this case, the police had nothing more than a suspect, but the press reacted toward him as the French underground had toward the Parisian women who had slept with German officers.